Dial femme for murder

Franois Ozon works quickly. He has made five movies in the past four years and everyone he works with describes him as a natural; the type of director who calmly walks onto the set and knows exactly what he wants, and gets it without any fuss, on schedule.

In critical circles, by contrast, the 35-year-old French director has developed a reputation for being a devilish prodigy who'll do anything for controversy. Homosexuality, incest, fetishism and other forms of transgression are the only connecting strands in his wildly fluctuating film career.

For Ozon's new film, 8 Women (8 Femmes in France), the novelty is spectacular commercial success. The film has been a huge hit in France, thanks primarily to a cast of top French female talent, led by Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Beart and Fanny Ardant. With a country house murder-mystery plot revolving around the death of the unseen patriarch, the film is something like a Gallic Gosford Park - the Musical.

Ozon's previous output hardly indicated his filmmaking would take this direction. He made his mark in 1997 with an hour-long short film See the Sea, which drew comparisons with Polanski and Hitchcock. His 1998 feature debut, Sitcom, was like an overexcited catalogue of his favourite perversions, in the style of Almodovar or John Waters. Then came Criminal Lovers, a "true crime fairytale" featuring murder, bondage and male and female rape, followed by Water Drops on Burning Rocks, a polysexual domestic tale based on an unproduced Fassbinder play. Ozon identified himself with the 18-year-old protagonist in Water Drops, who is seduced by an older man, but since then he has deflected attention from his own sexuality. Last year he made a radical departure into mature, pensive, heterosexual filmmaking with Under the Sand, starring Charlotte Rampling.

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"I made a list of my dream cast, and to my surprise, they all agreed," says Ozon, a tanned, well-groomed, relaxed man who looks more like a model for Ralph Lauren than French cinema's enfant terrible. "Maybe it was because of Under the Sand. The film was a success in France and Charlotte [Rampling] has made something of a comeback. I think these actresses wanted me to do the same for them."

It also helped to have so many beauty assistants on the set, he adds. Indeed, 8 Women goes to great lengths to make its stars look fabulous. The film's aesthetic is a homage to the haute couture splendour of 1950s Hollywood. The costumes quote classic films like Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) and Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon, and everything from hairstyle to facial lighting is highly considered. The actors also each get to perform a song-and-dance number (with varying degrees of success, it must be said).

The original intention, Ozon explains, was to remake George Cukor's women-only melodrama, The Women, but he discovered that the rights to that are owned by Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. Instead he settled on a play from the 1960s by Robert Thomas.

"I didn't really like the play - it's very old-fashioned - but I realised with this story I could put in all that I wanted to say about women, and make a film with different levels. The first level is very easy to understand for the audience, like an Agatha Christie book. In another way, it's a film about the family, about women together, and about cinema; actresses."

Feminist critics have complained that Ozon's heroines are all portrayed as bitchy, money-grabbing harlots beneath their glamorous veneers.

"People have said the film is misogynist," he acknowledges, "but if it was the same thing with men, nobody would say, 'He doesn't like men.' My wish was first to give the appearance of beauty, then to show that the women are different from their image, and in the end to love them because of their difference, because they are more complex."

French audiences certainly had no problem with Ozon's vision of femininity: the film was one of the year's best performers at the French box office, and has also done well in Germany. The film has also been popular with children.

"This makes me very happy," says Ozon, "as the film was like me releasing my inner child. I must admit, I used to play with dolls' houses when I was a boy."

This success comes at a time when French cinema has been congratulating itself for fighting off Hollywood. Last year French films took more than 40 per cent of the home market for the first time in two decades. Ozon's film was one of the reasons why; Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie was another, and people have been quick to lump them together, as colourful, quirky distillations of a "Frenchness" on which the country is losing its grip.

"It's funny, because the most successful films are the most French, but for me Amelie is a cliche of France. It's a tourist vision of France - that's why the film was a big success in America. I don't know if my film is a cliche too; my film is more about playing with the image of French glamour and fashion."